Hackaday Links: December 22, 2024

December 22, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Early Monday morning, while many of us will be putting the finishing touches — or just beginning, ahem — on our Christmas preparations, solar scientists will hold their collective breath as they wait for word from the Parker Solar Probe’s record-setting passage through the sun’s atmosphere. The probe, which has been in a highly elliptical solar orbit since its 2018 launch, has been getting occasional gravitational nudges by close encounters with Venus. This has moved the perihelion ever closer to the sun’s surface, and on Monday morning it will make its closest approach yet, a mere 6.1 million kilometers from the roiling photosphere. That will put it inside the corona, the sun’s extremely energetic atmosphere, which we normally only see during total eclipses. Traveling at almost 700,000 kilometers per hour, it won’t be there very long, and it’ll be doing everything it needs to do autonomously since the high-energy plasma of the corona and the eight-light-minute distance makes remote control impossible. It’ll be a few days before communications are re-established and the data downloaded, which will make a nice present for the solar science community to unwrap.

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Catching The View From The Edge Of Space

December 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

Does “Pix or it didn’t happen” apply to traveling to the edge of space on a balloon-lofted solar observatory? Yes, it absolutely does.

The breathtaking views on this page come courtesy of IRIS-2, a compact imaging package that creators [Ramón García], [Miguel Angel Gomez], [David Mayo], and [Aitor Conde] recently decided to release as open source hardware. It rode to the edge of space aboard Sunrise III, a balloon-borne solar observatory designed to study solar magnetic fields and atmospheric plasma flows.

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Building Experience And Circuits For Lithium Capacitors

December 2, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

For the cautious, a good piece of advice is to always wait to buy a new product until after the first model year, whether its cars or consumer electronics or any other major purchase. This gives the manufacturer a year to iron out the kinks and get everything ship shape the second time around. But not everyone is willing to wait on new tech. [Berto] has been interested in lithium capacitors, a fairly new type of super capacitor, and being unwilling to wait on support circuitry schematics to magically show up on the Internet he set about making his own.

The circuit he’s building here is a solar charger for the super capacitor. Being a fairly small device there’s not a lot of current, voltage, or energy, but these are different enough from other types of energy storage devices that it was worth taking a close look and designing something custom. An HT7533 is used for voltage regulation with a Schottky diode preventing return current to the solar cell, and a DW01 circuit is used to make sure that the capacitor doesn’t overcharge.

While the DW01 is made specifically for lithium ion batteries, [Berto] found that it was fairly suitable for this new type of capacitor as well. The capacitor itself is suited for many low-power, embedded applications where a battery might add complexity. Capacitors like this can charge much more rapidly and behave generally more linearly than their chemical cousins, and they aren’t limited to small applications either. For example, this RC plane was converted to run with super capacitors.

Senoko natural gas and oil-fired power station, Singapore in 2007. (Credit: Terence Ong)

Singapore’s 4300 Km Undersea Transmission Line With Australia Clears Regulatory Hurdle

October 23, 2024 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

The proposed AAPowerLink transmission line between Darwin (Australia) and Singapore. (Credit: Sun Cable)

Recently Singapore’s Energy Market Authority (EMA) granted Sun Cable conditional approval for its transmission line with Australia. Singapore has been faced for years now with the dilemma that its population’s energy needs keep increasing year-over-year, while it has very little space to build out its energy-producing infrastructure, least of all renewables with their massive footprints. This has left Singapore virtually completely dependent on natural gas-burning thermal plants. Continue reading “Singapore’s 4300 Km Undersea Transmission Line With Australia Clears Regulatory Hurdle” →

Universal Power Bank Customized To Your Liking

August 31, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

One of the most troubling trends of almost every modern consumer product that uses electricity is that the software that controls the product is likely to be proprietary and closed-source, which could be doing (or not doing) any number of things that its owner has no control over. Whether it’s a computer, kitchen appliance, or even a device that handles the electricity directly, it’s fairly rare to find something with software that’s open and customizable. That’s why [Traditional-Code9728] is working on a power bank with an open-source firmware.

From a hardware perspective the power bank is fairly open as well, with a number of options for connecting this device to anything else that might need power. It sports a bidirectional USB-C port as well as a DC barrel plug, either of which can either charge other devices or receive energy to charge its own battery. These ports can also accept energy from a solar panel and have MPPT built in. There’s also dual USB-A ports which can provide anywhere from five to 12 volts at 25 watts, and a color screen which shows the current status of the device.

While this is a prototype device, it’s still actively being worked on. Some future planned upgrades to the power bank include a slimmer design, charge limiting features to improve battery life, and more fine-tuned control of the output voltage and current on the USB-C port. With all of the software being open-source, as well as the circuit diagram and 3D printing files, it could find itself in plenty of applications as well. This power bank also stays under the energy limits for flying on most commercial airlines as well, but if you don’t plan on taking your power bank on an airplane then you might want to try out this 2000-watt monster instead.

The Sunchronizer Keeps Your Solar Panel Aligned

August 15, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 34 Comments

In the past few years, the price-per-watt for solar panels has dropped dramatically. This has led to a number of downstream effects beyond simple cost savings. For example, many commercial solar farms have found that it’s now cheaper to install a larger number of panels in fixed positions, rather than accepting the extra cost, maintenance, and complexity of a smaller number panels that use solar tracking to make up the difference. But although this practice is fading for large-scale power production, there are still some niche uses for solar tracking. Like [Fabian], if you need to maximize power production with a certain area or a small number of panels you’ll wan to to build a solar tracker.

[Fabian]’s system is based on a linear actuator which can tilt one to four panels (depending on size) in one axis only. This system is an elevation tracker, which is the orientation generally with respect to latitude, with a larger elevation angle needed in the winter and a lower angle in the summer. [Fabian] also designs these to be used in places like balconies where this axis can be more easily adjusted. The actuator is controlled with an ESP32 which, when paired with a GPS receiver, can automatically determine the sun’s position for a given time of day and adjust the orientation of the panel to provide an ideal elevation angle on a second-by-second basis. The ESP32 also allows seamless integration with home automation systems like SmartHome as well.

Although this system only tracks the sun in one axis right now, [Fabian] is working on support for a second axis which mounts the entire array on a rotating table similar to an automatic Lazy Susan. This version also includes a solar tracking sensor which measures solar irradiance in the direction the panel faces to verify that the orientation of the panel is maximizing power output for a given amount of sunlight. Tracking the sun in two axes can be a complicated problem to solve, but some solutions we’ve seen don’t involve any GPS, programming, or even control electronics at all.

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Australia’s Controlled Loads Are In Hot Water

August 15, 2024 by Lewin Day 125 Comments

Australian grids have long run a two-tiered pricing scheme for electricity. In many jurisdictions, regular electricity was charged at a certain rate. Meanwhile, you could get cheaper electricity for certain applications if your home was set up with a “controlled load.” Typically, this involved high energy equipment like pool heaters or hot water heaters.

This scheme has long allowed Australians to save money while keeping their water piping-hot at the same time. However, the electrical grid has changed significantly in the last decade. These controlled loads are starting to look increasingly out of step with what the grid and the consumer needs. What is to be done?